A quick glance at Clint Dempsey's stat line from the U.S. men's national team's 2-0 loss to Colombia on Friday night would seem to indicate that he wasn't a problem. He tallied seven shots, including a header cleared off the line and a free kick that forced Colombian keeper David Ospina into an excellent diving save.
The team as a whole mustered only 12 shots, and Dempsey's free kick was the only one on target. How could Dempsey be a problem if he was, in effect, the only player who managed anything resembling attacking production?
Dempsey's performance Friday looks a lot different from a tactical perspective, however. While he was able to get his own shot with seeming ease, he did very little else in either an attacking or defending sense. Here's a look both inside and outside the numbers at Dempsey's performance against Colombia, and why a change is needed up top for the USMNT.
The Dempsey dilemma
Superficially, Dempsey's passing numbers against Colombia look fine: Going 22-for-25 is an admirable completion rate for a striker. But a look under the hood shows that the high completion percentage masks a total lack of linking up with his fellow attackers. Dempsey completed a grand total of two passes to Gyasi Zardes and one to Bobby Wood, the attackers flanking him. Similarly, he received only two passes from Zardes and one from Wood.
Dempsey as center forward means that Wood in particular is forced to play out of position on the left as a kind of hybrid winger/striker, a role in which he's terribly unsuited. Wood is as traditional a striker as you'll find and, when deployed on the left, any ability he might have to influence the game is lost. He had a grand total of nine touches in the attacking third of the pitch on Friday, and none in the attacking penalty area. He was unable to come in off the wing to find pockets of space to get his own shot, and failed to set up others. In the entire time he was on the field he received a grand total of four passes in the attacking third.
This is the Clint Dempsey experience, and it's nothing new. Dempsey's biggest strength, to somewhat paraphrase former USMNT and current LA Galaxy coach Bruce Arena, is that Dempsey "tries stuff." He gets off an audacious 35-yarder, he wriggles through two defenders in the box when it seems like his angle to goal has been cut off or he magically creates an extra split second to take a touch and score a goal. Throughout the majority of Dempsey's career, that skill set has been an unambiguous asset for the USMNT. When the goal of the team was to stay compact and defend, Dempsey's ability to manufacture an attack out of thin air was necessary. It was either that or nothing. Or, when Dempsey was young enough to be deployed as a midfielder, it meant that he could show up as an extra, complementary player taking advantage of the space created by those ahead of him.
However, the USMNT is no longer a counterattacking team. For better or worse, Jurgen Klinsmann is committed to playing possession football. How it does that is an ongoing open question, and certainly over the past two years the team has failed more than it has succeeded at having -- and implementing -- a game plan. But in theory a team predicated on possession and creating chances by tilting the field in its favor is more in need of players who work in combination with one another and less in need of a player whose specialty is creating an individual moment of brilliance for himself.
And, in fact, the early returns on this particular brand of the USMNT are that it has made strides in the possession part of the game. Against Colombia, the team was consistently able to trot out an aggressively high defensive line as a result of having possession, which allowed both fullbacks, DeAndre Yedlin and Fabian Johnson, to consistently camp out in Colombia's half of the field when the U.S. had the ball. Combine that with a midfield that has two able passers in Alejandro Bedoya and Michael Bradley (and conveniently ignore that Bradley was terrible on Friday), and you have the platform for an attack that creates chances using possession to pass through the opposition. The fullbacks provide width, the midfielders set the table and the three attackers position themselves narrowly to combine quickly and overload the center of the opposition's defense.
But with an attacking trio of Dempsey flanked by Wood and Zardes, that capstone seems unlikely to happen. It's not what Dempsey does, and consequently it leaves Zardes and Wood out in the cold.
Other options
The two most high-profile attacking substitutes that Klinsmann has at his disposal are Darlington Nagbe and Christian Pulisic. And though each brings something slightly different to the table, either one might be a more natural fit in this system than trying to shoehorn both Dempsey and Wood into the team's front line.
Nagbe in particular is extremely comfortable conducting attacks in tight, advanced spaces, and he consistently operates by coming in from the left side of the attack with the Portland Timbers. He's the Timbers' third-most involved player, playing just shy of 48 passes per 90 minutes and receiving the ball 38 times per 90 -- and playing those passes primarily from an inside left position.
Those numbers would obviously be lower with the national squad, but the point is that Nagbe is a player who fills the creative attacker role that was missing in Friday's starting lineup. Additionally, his ability to control play would hopefully allow him to combine more often with Fabian Johnson, springing the talented left back into more dangerous positions as opposed to leaving him stranded on the wing, where he provides width but lacks players to pass to in order to create dangerous opportunities.
Pulisic, the 17-year-old starlet, is more of a wild card. While his on-ball skills are undeniable, it's harder to know just how much his off-ball presence will fit with this group. He has made only nine appearances for Borussia Dortmund, and only four of those were starts. Additionally, Dortmund, under head coach Thomas Tuchel, is a highly organized and tactically trained outfit, a far cry from Klinsmann's more hands-off approach with the USMNT. Whether Pulisic will thrive at such a young age without the clear tactical role he's offered by Tuchel is an open question.
So while a 4-3-3 still seems to best fit this roster, the current arrangement up top doesn't. Deploying a starting lineup with either Wood or Dempsey at center forward along with either Nagbe or Pulisic coming in on the wing makes sense, with Wood being a more natural center forward than Dempsey and Nagbe being a surer thing (at this point) to produce over Pulisic.
Outlook
On Friday, the USMNT looked like it was caught between two opposite theories of attack. The majority of its lineup was geared to take defensive risks in order to maintain possession of the ball and have plenty of attacking options in the final third. That decision largely worked. Defensively, the team dared Colombia to exploit the space in behind it, and for the most part, Colombia was unable to do so. In a very real way, that defensive success is what exposed the USMNT's offensive problems. If it hadn't successfully tilted the field in its favor -- if Colombia had, in fact, maintained possession and pinned the U.S. back and forced it to play quick attacks -- then the Americans might have needed Dempsey to create something from nothing in order to threaten goal.
But, as it turned out, with more than enough possession in Colombia's half, Dempsey's tendency to be a ball-stopper hurt the squad more than it helped it. Dempsey took seven shots, but it seems that those shots came at the expense of other, better opportunities that could have been generated by a more coherent front line.
At this point, Clint Dempsey is an insurance policy. The way he plays ensures that a team can get scoring chances even if its attack breaks down. But if the United States wants to progress to the latter stages of Copa America, it's time for Klinsmann and Co. to trust in the attack that they've built. If the U.S. is playing well, it doesn't need Dempsey's shots. And if it's playing poorly, well, just like on Friday, those shots probably won't be enough to save it anyway.